Case Study on Professional Literature - Action-Press

Intro

A lot of clients turn to context advertising to boost profits, overtake competitors, or make themselves known. Everything is a bit different with Aktion-Press. We have been in cooperation with them since 2018, and at the time Aktion-Press was already a leader in the professional media market 🏆. The company publishes electronic and printed publications for accountants, managers, and HR officers and reaches several million readers.

In order to increase the volume of sales of print and electronic publications through the company’s website, the management decided to include PPC advertising.

Initial Data

• Client’s website – action-press.ru
• Advertising account – Google Ads
• Advertising account – Yandex.Direct

Before establishing objectives for the project, we sent a brief to the customer’s marketing department. The completed document gave us an understanding of the target audience, products, promotions, and other information that’s necessary to understand the client’s business.

☝An important point of cooperation with Aktion-Press was coordinating with the company’s marketers, who provide us with current prices and inform us about ongoing promotions. The flexibility of the advertising settings allows us to respond to changes in time and advertise current offers.

Objectives

Aktion-Press works in the Russian media market and has recognizable branding and a good reputation with the audience. It was important for us to maintain its existing position and increase the number of conversions. To do this, we set up the following objectives:

• Launching search advertising and remarketing on Google
• Launching search advertising and retargeting on Yandex
• Setting up an advertising campaign with Gmail

Course of Action

All the company’s publications are quite recognizable and are resold by several agencies. For this reason, we decided to launch a separate advertising campaign for each product, as well as to set up a branding campaign at the request of ‘Aktion-Press.’

Implementation

Google Ads

Here we focused on intellectual strategies, but we also did some preparatory work beforehand:

• We launched a separate search ad for each publication
• We set up an average bid per query ad in order for Google to collect similar audiences
• We chose the ‘Target price per conversion’ strategy.

✔ As a result, Google bids higher and raises the ad to the top if it knows that the user is more likely to take an action considered a conversion. And our client receives more orders for a lower conversion cost.

We set up remarketing for those who have visited the site but didn’t make an order.

Yandex.Direct

Since Aktion-Press is a direct publisher and a majority of business in a rather narrow field, Yandex.Direct uses a broad key match.

✔Our ads catch the eye even of those users who enter in the search the names of publications with errors, incorrect word order, as well as queries that are related to the advertised product in some other way.

While working, we added negative keywords and adjust bids in order to consistently occupy the top positions in the search results.

We also set up retargeting, which reminds anyone who didn’t make a purchase about products by Aktion-Press.

Gmail

In order to expand the audience, we decided to try out the Gmail mail service. The meaning of advertising was that Gmail users receive a letter marked ‘advertising’ in the Promotions or Social Networks section 📧. And if the recipient was interested in the offer, they could go directly from the letter to the site.

❌ However, Gmail didn’t bring in the desired results so we decided to abandon the format. This was determined by the following:

1. This ad format has a small reach in Russia.
2. Specifically for the client’s business, this ad format is not suitable as regular mailing to the client’s base works much better.

Work with promotions and prices

Receiving up-to-date information from the Aktion-Press’ marketing department, we could adapt our advertising campaigns:

• Every month we change prices for magazines in the price extension for Google and in a special price field for Yandex.
• About 1-2 times a month, Aktion Press launches promotions for its clients. During this period, we add extensions to Google Ads and change the texts in ads in Yandex.Direct.
• If needed, we created promotional pages depending on the situation.
• We pay special attention to analytics, which gives us an understanding of which promotions are most effective.

Results

The maximum reach of search queries, creation of relevant ads, and the use of smart strategies – all of this led to a very high CTR, at over 20%.

The client had set a limit on conversion cost at 1000 rubles, and the use of smart strategies allowed us to not stay under it, but also leave a wide margin.

Indicators for some publications (taken as a 30-day period):

The Magazine ‘Glavbukh’: 67 conversions, cost of conversion at 188 rubles.

The Magazine ‘Company Lawyer’: 16 conversions at 342 rubles.

The Journal ‘Personnel business’: 25 conversions at 351 rubles.

Conclusion

Successful companies don’t stand still and stay in place but work on development every day. Growth in sales and retention of leading positions in the market is possible only through proper engagement with the audience, including through PPC advertising settings.

We still work with Aktion-Press, monitoring campaign statistics, changing settings if necessary, and adapting advertising to current prices and promotional offers.

Initially, the flexible campaign setup, the connection with Google’s smart strategy, and consistent work in Yandex led us to the desired indicators, which we’ve been maintaining for more than 2 years.